“WE HAVE A DEAL,” US President-elect Donald Trump said on his social media channel Truth Social, as Israel and the Hamas terrorist organization agreed a ceasefire on Wednesday. He will get much of the credit if this marks the end of what has been a brutal war — and he’ll deserve it.

It isn’t that he or his foreign policy team came up with a new solution. As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sought to highlight in a valedictory speech at Washington’s Atlantic Council on Tuesday, the deal on offer appears to have changed very little since its last-minute rejection by Israel months ago.

Nor was it Trump’s threat to let all hell break loose that will have done the trick. Hell has been breaking loose ever since Hamas launched its mass terror attack Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. There is little more that any US president could do to dial up Israel’s scorched earth retaliation.

No, the fact that an agreement could at last be reached was down to the simple clarity of Trump’s demand that it must happen, and now. That has forced not only Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but also his ultra-right cabinet members to confront a binary choice: Play ball, or alienate the most amenable leader to themselves and their goals ever elected to the US presidency.

You can feel for Blinken, President Joe Biden and the rest of the outgoing US foreign policy team as Trump reaps the win from their tireless work in bringing two fundamentally hostile parties together. It’s been a thankless job, as Blinken’s interruption by three different hecklers during his speech attested. But they don’t deserve all that much sympathy.

True,........

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